Here are some designs we've found useful and wanted to share.

We’ve spent some time exploring how people could best interact with our software. Creating cardboard enclosures has been invaluable for that, and we took the time to write-up and publish our templates for the benefit of others.

These cases combine standoffs and fixings to create fairly resilient enclosures. Most of the cases are double skin designs that provide greater rigidity and scope for two tone designs. All can be cut from A4 sized card and none require adhesive.

Speaker Phat + Pi Zero

Adafruit 128x64 OLED + Pi Zero

Cardboard is an excellent material for rapidly prototyping enclosures.

Card has several benefits over say plastic, it’s:

• quick — even with manual cutting it’s possible to print, cut and assemble a new case in 30 minutes. It’s generally more labour than 3D printing a design, but the turnaround is much quicker.

• inexpensive — card is readily available and fairly cheap.

• easy to customize — card is available in a wide variety of colours and you can easily print custom artwork too. It’s also easy to doodle ideas onto the card. But better than the cosmetic freedom is the ease with which many structural modifications can be made. For example, ports can be hidden by ignoring cuts or extra ports revealed by cutting new holes.

• recyclable — card has the virtue of being recyclable and there’s now greater recognition of the environmental harm that plastic waste is causing.

Card also has a few disadvantages. It’s:

• combustible — evidence and reason suggest that there’s very little risk that the heat generated by a Raspberry Pi would could ignite the card but sparks and open flames might, and the case must be kept away from these. If in doubt we recommend treating the card with flame retardant spray.

• not waterproof — few cases will be watertight, but whereas liquid splashes could be wiped off a plastic case, it’s probable that a cardboard case would need to be removed until dry and possibly discarded.

• necessary to exercise care when cutting